Spoiler alert: it’s not rocket science.
I'm a veteran graphic designer. My job is to create epic stories through visual design—be it in print or digital media. I'm really good at what I do. But writing? Not so much. That doesn't mean I am bad at it: I've been an avid reader my whole life, a blogger, a zine writer, a Twitter warrior, a manual creator, a closet novel-starter (rarely finisher), and even turned my “pen” used to some magazine articles. But there's one thing I had never written before: a press release.
So, how did I do it? I went back to my tried-and-true visual design process and followed the same steps to write the press release:
1: Research
After two thirds of my life spent mostly in front of Adobe products, I started a project I knew nothing about the way I start all my design projects: with research. When designing, a lot of my research time is spent looking at visuals, but for writing, a lot of my research time was spent reading press releases. I probably read about 40-50 with similar themes in one sitting. It IS very much a templated art, and reading them all, i got an idea of what that template should look like. Stephen King’s first writing tip on his On Writing memoir is to read. It’s as relevant in writing horror fiction as it is to write a press release. So that’s what I did, I read. A lot.
2: Sketch your ideas
When designing, my second order of business is to grab a piece of paper and sketch ideas. No software, just old fashioned paper and pens, and some time thinking things through—it doesn’t even have to be good, my sketches are stick figures and crazy lines and you’d NEVER guess I design for a living from them. The important thing about the sketching step is that you put ideas down on paper so you can start shaping your project outside of your head. For the press release, I did it somewhat similarly, but instead of drawing, I opened a notebook and wrote down an outline, people I wanted to talk to, sections of other press releases I found interesting, and so on.
3: Talk to other people
My third step when designing is to talk to people. Usually the client, to have an idea what they are looking for, who their audience is, what their goals are with the project. Sometimes that conversation leads to reiterating steps one and two. When writing that first press release, I booked some time with people that knew more about the subject matter than I did, and were also stakeholders on this release, and interviewed them, so I could hear it in their own words what their thoughts and goals were with this specific project I was writing about.
4: Dump your ideas on the page
Now it’s when the design/writing actually starts. This part is NOT glamorous at all. While designing, I call this phase the “brain dump,” I just open my Adobe software of choice and dump all the copy I have, my ideas, inspiration images, resources I need, color palettes, logos, etc. The same thing happened when writing, I opened Google Docs and dumped my outline, my favorite quotes from my stakeholders, jotted down some of the things I had thought about while doing all the research/interview portion. Not pretty, and not any semblance of an actual press release, but hey, it works for me.
5: Draft and iterate
From that brain dump, I make a draft. Be it a designed first version (or versions) of things, that I then send to the stakeholders to review with a lot of explanations and notes attached to explain what they are looking at; or be it my first press release, with a ton of added comments in the margins about words I was unsure of, sections we could cut for brevity, and placeholders for things I still needed to add and wanted help from the stakeholders to get. It’s also at this stage that I share my work with my peers: either other designers that I trust and value their opinion—working with them makes me a better designer—or in this case, to other writers I’ve worked with in my life that I know will be great sources of unbiased feedback and critique, especially because I am new at this.
6: Refine and edit
The next part of the design/writing process is probably the one I spend the longest at: refining. I use the feedback I gathered from others and spend some quality time with my work. No distractions, doors closed, phone on silent mode—that kind of quality time. I re-read my work several times, move things around, edit words out, refine my thoughts, have a despairing moment where I think everything is absolute trash, take a tea break, get back to it with a clear head and keep chiseling away till a masterpiece emerges. Or at least something functional that does the job, this is just my first press release after all, I didn’t expect an award from it, just a thumbs up from the boss and to publish it on Newswire.
7: Press play
Outlining my design—and writing—processes like this seems very linear, but a lot of it happens at the same time and/or we return to the beginning and reiterate and so on. But really, what I wanted to get at with this article is that maybe there is a right process to write a press release I could have learned at school, but here I am, almost two decades after college and I can use tried-and-true principles from my own craft to do something in a completely different medium. And guess what? It works. So feel free to replace “writing press release” with other creative endeavors and use my design process for your benefit.